Primed for Murder

by Jack Ewing

  Toby bent to feel what had tripped him: a big man’s body, still warm but not moving. No heartbeat. Something tacky under his fingers: blood, lots of it. Beneath the coppery smell was a pungent aroma of cordite and layered under that was a tang of garlic. It was Gino, and he was dead as yesterday’s news. Toby stepped over the crumpled bulk blocking the hallway like an industrial-sized bag of fertilizer, and inched across the carpet. If he remembered correctly, the kitchen should be along here to the right.

  A light suddenly caught him in the face, blinding him. “Police! Freeze!” Toby shut his eyes but otherwise didn’t twitch. Behind his eyelids the world was brilliant reds and yellows. “On your face,” someone commanded. “Hands behind your back.”

  Toby obeyed the orders with alacrity. Light pinned him. Booted feet came closer. Hands patted the length of his body, then roughly aligned his arms and clamped cold steel around his wrists. He was yanked to his feet and propelled down the hall into Giambi’s living room.

  The place was a mess and getting messier by the minute. Windows looking onto the lake had been shattered. Shards of broken glass glittered in the beams of many flashlights as dark-clad men—with POLICE printed in glowing neon on their jackets—prowled about.

  One man ripped an abstract painting from a wall, flung it to the floor and put his foot through the canvas. Another methodically drew three-inch-deep Xs on cushions and backs of every couch and chair with the serrated blade of a folding knife. A third man kicked a delicate wooden table into kindling.

  The tearing, crashing sounds of senseless destruction emanated from every corner of the house.

  His captors led Toby through a couple of turns and into a large, windowless conference room that served as headquarters for the police raid. The room seemed crowded. Bright lanterns were placed at either end of a thirty-foot-long mahogany table that showed fresh scratches on its highly polished surface. Comfortable-looking leather captain’s chairs surrounding the table appeared to have been attacked by tigers.

  In stark illumination, four men with weapons, all in POLICE-emblazoned windbreakers over bulletproof vests, were clustered around Dezi and the dumpy gray-haired woman Toby had seen earlier. The two females were huddled together on a loveseat in one corner. The men alternately demanded, “Tell us where they are!” or “Give it up, ladies!” or shouted curses. The women remained tight-lipped. Dezi, Toby noticed, had a black eye—courtesy of Artie or her dad or the police? Other battle-attired policemen stood over the blood-splattered bodies of three dark-haired, tough-looking men whom Toby had never seen before.

  “Look what I found,” a man holding Toby’s left arm said. The men around the bodies turned to look. One was stocky, sandy-haired: French.

  The detective came forward. “Where’d you come from?” he asked. French gestured and the man holding Toby unlocked the handcuffs.

  Toby rubbed at red marks around his wrists. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “You first.”

  How to play it? The truth seemed best. “I was out boating with your partner.”

  “Dixon? Where is he?” French’s green cop-eyes bored into Toby’s.

  This is going to be tricky, Toby thought. Cops always took it bad when one of their own bought it, even if the dead man was no damn good. He took a deep breath and let words spill out. “Dixon won’t be joining us. He went for a late swim.”

  French frowned. “I don’t follow you.”

  “He dived in the lake,” Toby said, “but he didn’t come up.”

  The detective’s eyes went wide. “You’re saying he’s dead?”

  Prompted by rapid-fire questions from hard men standing too close for comfort, Toby related what had happened with Dixon. “I didn’t mean to kill him.”

  The story didn’t seem to mollify the policemen. They shot Toby with large-caliber, high-velocity glares and fingered holstered weapons.

  French scratched his chin, studying Toby. He sniffed a cha-cha. “If it’s as you say, Rew, it sounds like self-defense. You’ve got a right to protect yourself, even against a rogue cop.” He sighed and turned away, taking Toby with him. “I knew he was bent, my own partner,” French whispered. “But I never suspected he’d go this far.”

  Toby’s face felt hot. “You knew Dixon was crooked?”

  French sighed again. “I saw him take payoffs from known mob associates. I told the chief about him months ago and we started an undercover operation, in cooperation with Madison County Law Enforcement, since Cazenovia is out of our jurisdiction. We were giving Dixon rope, watching him, waiting for him to hook up with Giambi. He’d have been arrested along with the rest of the crooks, if it’d worked out that way.” He beat out the opening bars of a nasal tango.

  “You gave him too much rope. He almost hanged me with the slack.”

  “We had you all the way. There’s a tracking device on your truck.”

  “We didn’t take my truck, damn it.” His voice was raw with anger. Toby felt like punching French’s leaky nose. “I got hauled out here in the trunk of Artie’s car.”

  “Know all about it.” French reached into a jacket pocket and displayed the miniature transmitter the detective had tried to convince Toby to carry. “I planted this in your new place yesterday, figuring somebody might brace you there. We were just down the road and heard every word, including Artie’s confession of murder.”

  What gall these bastards had! “Then you know how close Artie came to shooting.” Toby shook with suppressed rage. “You could have heard me being killed.”

  “What are you getting worked up about? You talked your way out of it.” French chuckled. “Bet that doesn’t happen too often with Artie.”

  “I couldn’t talk your partner out of trying to kill me.” Toby’s fists clenched into tight balls. “He was sure as death going to do it. If he hadn’t gotten careless, I wouldn’t be talking to you now. Where were you when Dixon took me out in the boat? What plan did you have to protect me out in the middle of the lake?”

  “Take it easy. You won and Dixon lost. I hate to say it, but it’s probably best Frank ended up this way.” He glanced at the other men around him and raised his voice. “We can write it up so it looks like Dixon died in the line of duty, make sure his family gets taken care of.” Other men muttered agreement.

  “You’ll go along with that, won’t you, Rew?” French said, all earnest. “Dixon’s wife and kids didn’t do anything wrong. No sense making it hard on them.”

  “I don’t care. Just leave me out of it from now on.”

  Three grunting policemen dragged Gino’s limp corpse into the room, intent upon lining him up with the other bodies on the floor. When they passed, Toby saw the mob soldier had taken half a dozen hits in the body. One large-caliber hole through the thick throat had probably done the trick.

  An officer who’d been grilling the women came over. “They won’t talk,” he said to French. “We’ve searched the house and grounds and shore. No dice. They must have got away by boat during the firefight.”

  “You pass anybody on your way in, Rew?” French asked him sharply. The detective looked worried.

  “Not that I noticed. Missing somebody?”

  French ruffled his sandy hair. “Just the main players. We have two live women and four dead soldiers. Old man Giambi, Leo and Artie are all gone.”

  Toby wondered if he’d somehow wandered into a Keystone Cops movie. “They were all here when I rowed away with Dixon.”

  “They didn’t leave by the front gate, that’s for sure. We smashed it down on the way in.” French tugged an earlobe. “If they didn’t get away across the water—”

  “They must still be here,” another policeman concluded.

  Toby let out trapped breath. Did he have to do everything for these clowns? He’d better tell them—he’d never feel safe until all the bad guys were rounded up and locked away. “I might know where they’re hiding,” he said.

  That got everybody’s attention. He led a troop of armed lawmen,
headed by French, through the darkened house. They went out the broken glass doors, across the deck and down the stairs leading to the basement, Toby explaining as he went. Other raiders were already down there, working to crank the generator. As Toby’s group passed through, an engine started up and lights flickered to life. In the marble-floored lounge, Toby found the remote control, turned on the TV and punched up 888. The mirrored door across the room clicked open. There was no elevator, only empty space with taut cables visible running up and down.

  French shone a flashlight down the shaft. “The elevator car is down there. I can see it.” His voice echoed hollowly. The detective ordered someone to call SWAT and came over where Toby stood. “Looks like you were right. They’re down there. Is there any other way out?”

  “Not that I know of. The treasure vault is supposed to be air-tight.”

  “Giambi’s slippery,” French mused. “Wouldn’t put it past him to have another escape route built-in somewhere.”

  Chapter 26

  As it turned out, there was no other way out of the vault Giambi had built to protect his ill-gotten goodies.

  The SWAT relief team soon arrived, along with a fleet of ambulances to carry off dead and wounded. Dezi and Mom Giambi, held as material witnesses, were led away for further grilling. French allowed Toby to remain in the safety of the plush lounge and watch the finale unfold. Black-clad men, faces covered by masks that concealed everything but their eyes, rappelled down the elevator shaft with weapons slung over their shoulders. “Found blood!” someone yelled.

  French’s walkie-talkie crackled. “Team leader. We’ll need something besides explosives to get past the vault. The shaft will fall down before that door comes off. Send down a torch.” He sent the elevator up so it could be loaded with the required gear.

  Tanks and cutting equipment were brought and delivered below. After a bit, the team leader reported they were making headway but that it was slow work. It took more than two hours to breach the outer door, during which time Toby watched an old black-and-white Robert Mitchum suspense movie on Giambi’s big-screen television.

  “More blood here,” the team leader reported once they’d bored through solid steel. “Somebody’s hurt bad.”

  The SWAT team used an intercom at the control panel between vault doors to try to raise the men inside and persuade them to surrender. They got no reply. So they fiddled with other controls. They turned off lights, raised humidity to rainforest damp and dropped the temperature below freezing inside the treasure room in an attempt to drive the fugitives out through discomfort, without further risk to the invaders.

  The team leader reported conditions periodically via walkie-talkie: “It’s down to forty now…we’ve hit twenty Fahrenheit…humidity’s at ninety percent and the temp’s minus fifteen. If they’re in there, they must be getting damn cold.”

  There was still no reaction from inside the room. Many wondered aloud: Were they alive? Were they even in there? Or had they made good their escape and was this an expensive exercise in futility?

  Hours passed while everyone waited for something to happen. The SWAT team changed shifts. Outside, the sun peeped over the horizon. Toby watched the morning news—nothing yet about the raid, the deaths or the standoff—and dozed during a game show. Somebody rustled up coffee. Somebody else ran to a 24-hour bakery and brought back dozens of assorted doughnuts and pastries. Policeman came and went. Some stood around by twos or threes, talking in low voices. A few napped. Others played cards.

  Finally, in the afternoon, things started to happen. After phoning for an okay from his boss, French, who was in charge of the field operation, told the men below to cut through the inner door. More waiting ensued, but now there was an edge to it.

  Fifty-one anxious minutes later, the team leader called up: “We’re inside. The vault is secure. Come on down. You got to see this.”

  French and a couple policemen got into the elevator. The detective looked out at Toby. “Want to come along for the ride, Rew? You deserve to be in at the end.”

  With mixed feelings, he climbed aboard. The elevator control panel had been unscrewed and wires inside had been tampered with to make it run. French pushed “1” and the little room began to descend. It took only seconds to reach the bottom but it seemed longer. The outer vault door stood open, a roughly circular, yard-wide hole burned through its lower corner. Petrified slag stood in little piles and dribbles on the floor. A thick chunk of metal, its edges scorched, leaned against the wall. The inner door was punched where the keyhole had been.

  A black-clad man between the two doors stood at the room controls, making adjustments. “I’ve raised the temp,” he said over a shoulder, “but it’ll take time before you feel it getting warmer. It’s a big area.”

  The SWAT team leader, a hard-faced, no-nonsense man, met them at the entrance to the inner chamber, spoiling the surprise. “They’re in there, all three of them. All dead.”

  They filed into the room. It was like stepping into a commercial meat locker and heated breath generated clouds of short-lived smoke. Toby started to shiver when he saw the still figures sprawled about the room. As they neared each body, it became obvious what had happened, though it was difficult to tell in what sequence events had unfolded.

  When their plan to escape undetected fell through, the three men had decided to try waiting it out instead of surrendering and putting their lawyers to work. But with falling temperature, they couldn’t hold out too long.

  Somebody had warmed things up. The glass fronts of most display cases had been battered in with an armchair and their contents removed. Ashes were mounded on the dark marble floor where precious papers had been dragged out and set afire to provide a few moments of heat. Millions of dollars worth of ancient and irreplaceable documents had gone up in smoke.

  At some point, the men had turned on one another.

  Artie was draped over the platform in the center of the room, his pistol empty in limp fingers. A thin coating of frost rimed his face, made his thick eyebrows seem carved from ice. It looked like he’d caught a couple rounds during the gunfight upstairs, in arm and shoulder, and his shirt was stained red. But it was a switchblade that had caused his death—there were defense wounds on Artie’s hands and arms—and the slender knife was still stuck between his ribs where his heart would be.

  Leo was sprawled face-up on the floor, his head and chest blackened and charred by fire. He held a book of matches in a bloodstained hand now curled into a claw. The other hand sprawled loosely just inches from a small black automatic with an empty clip. The filigreed silver lighter and a heavy crystal decanter, chipped and stained with blood and drained of liquid, rested beside his slender body. A dull film surrounding Leo took the shine off the floor. The odor of heated liquor and burnt flesh was strong in his vicinity.

  Old man Giambi slumped in an armchair. By marks on his face, he’d been slugged. His lips were blue, fixed in a grimace that showed stained teeth. He appeared to have suffered a fatal heart attack: one gnarled hand still bunched the shirt fabric at his chest.

  Toby felt woozy and sat on the edge of the platform, facing away while policemen pawed at the crumpled corpses. The many voices of the living men around him dissolved into a drone. He could see how events transpired as clearly as if he’d been in here with the dead men and had witnessed everything.

  When the temperature in the vault dropped, it would have been Leo, the crafty independent thinker, who’d wanted to burn the manuscripts to make heat and stave off frostbite. The normal hierarchy of the mob had broken down. It was the law of the jungle, every man for himself and survival of the fittest now.

  Giambi, naturally, would have been horrified at Leo’s suggestion—he’d rather freeze to death than see his precious reading material destroyed.

  Artie, the slow-witted company man, still trying to get back in his father-in-law’s good graces, had tried to stop Leo from destroying his boss’s expensive possessions. But Artie had been wounded in the
firefight. His superior strength and an empty gun were no match for a blade in the hands of somebody who knew how to use it. The two men had struggled and Leo had killed Artie, losing his weapon in the process. The muscle-bound hit man just wasn’t lucky with knives.

  The old man had pitched in at some point but Leo had cuffed him around and burned the papers. Giambi had managed to gather enough strength to take the liquor bottle from the compartment in his chair and conk Leo with it. He’d doused Tombs with the alcohol, set him ablaze in reprisal for his lost prizes. Then he’d collapsed, spent, and died.

  Toby’s head swam with a badly edited newsreel of all those who had lost their lives in connection with that old bad-luck codex—Revuelto, Bart, the Puterbaughs, Dixon, Gino and his tough colleagues, now these three—a dozen people in all. He’d damn near bought it himself a couple times. And all for nothing: the Mayan book and the other rare paper items Giambi had carefully collected over the years were now all reduced to ash. It was so senseless, such a waste.

  French was talking, bending over him, gripping his shoulder and looking concerned. Toby staggered to his feet, hearing the noise but not making out the other man’s words. “I just want to go home.”

  They rode upstairs in silence. The detective collared a uniformed officer to drive Toby to the Buckley Road house. Now the danger was past, permanently, no reason existed not to return there at least temporarily, until he was capable of thinking about what to do with the rest of his life. French accompanied Toby to the cruiser, holding onto his elbow to assist him, as if Toby were old or crippled.

  The sun was low in a cloudy sky. The big stone house, neatly clipped lawn and many assembled vehicles were touched with gold. Faces took on an Oriental cast.

  Toby got to sit in the front seat of the police car this time. “It didn’t turn out as I’d hoped,” French said, leaning in the open window to impart a goodbye sniff, a farewell whiff of bad breath. “I really wanted to bring in Giambi and the others alive.” The young detective’s eyes looked wet. “Frank, too.”